Since openSUSE 12.1 is the version that I am working with, and there is no longer a controlled build environment for the previous version, I will not be providing any new Dolphin Viewer packages for openSUSE 11.3.

I want to remind everybody that posting comments on the blog here is not the officially supported way to obtain support for the Dolphin Viewer. That’s what the forum is for. Background: forum posts send me notifications, comments on the blog don’t.

Commenting on blog pages has been disabled for this reason until further notice.

To upload mesh, the viewer needs to be able to do what is called “convex hull decomposition” on the uploaded mesh object. This is for the purpose of creating the “collision mesh”, which determines where the physical hull of the object is, the surface that things bounce off. Simply, with that you can walk across a mesh boulder without the need for it to be phantom + a non-phantom invisiprim, but you don’t walk on empty air a foot over the rock either, like you would with a sculpt.

The problems for Third Party Viewers come from the fact that the original source code uses parts of the Havoc physics engine to do this, and that code can’t be given away, because it’s not open source.

Several members of the Snowstorm community are working on a replacement that is based on an open-source physics engine, and so far they have something quite promising but not quite ready. Things are looking good though.

Another hot topic are the new (and in my opinion much improved) web profiles.

The web profiles were removed from Dolphin Viewer 2 in release 2.5.3 because back then, they were just way too broken for me to be happy with having them in a viewer meant for actual daily use.

Let’s just be quick and painless: Any 2.7 / 2.8 based Dolphin viewer (the version yet to come that will have mesh) will also have web profiles. And since I’m kind of forced to wait for the people with the mesh open source thingie, I’ll be working on plugging the new web profiles back into Dolphin 2.5 in the meantime. With some small improvements of course or my avie’s name is not Lance Corrimal 😉

Ok, there haven’t been any, but who could pass an opportunity to quote Mark Twain, hm?

Anyway, I have a new day job which proves to be quite demanding. On top of that, certain real life things proved to be more important, such as trying to keep my wife from falling apart after her mom died and her brother either proved to be the biggest, unmitigated arse on the face of the planet, or proved to be married to the biggest, unmitigated arse on the face of the planet, I haven’t decided which.

But I digress, and therefore, without further ado, present you with Dolphin Viewer 2.5.8.15020.

As you can see it’s still based on 2.5 source. Partially for reasons mentioned above, partially for reasons to do with the complexity of the changes between 2.5 and 2.7 on one side, and RLV 2.4 and 2.7 on the other side.

What’s new in 2.5.8:

hovertext is now properly occluded behind objects

you can copy a list of everything in your Outfit/Worn tab to your clipboard (the “Look of the day” blog crowd will love this)

when building, you now have the option to directly create a new prim as “Sculpt” instead of creating anything else and then changing it

the cache can be bigger than 1 gig

the logfile gets less spam about sim capabilities

Quick HowTo about the worn items list:

go to your “My Outfits / Worn” tab

click on the “gear” button at the bottom of the sidebar

Choose “Copy outfit list to clipboard”

Paste the list into your blog post / forum post / whatever you need it for